The Oakland Education Week in Review: 1/18-1/24

Last week, inspiring stories from our youth, from their role in MLK day, to a new movie, to a teen app creator, a talk with homeschoolers, OUSD starts to do affordable housing, some amazing support for Mam speakers, Lighthouse moves towards universal dyslexia screening, why DEI work with teachers doesn’t work, its school choice time and we have advice for Black parents, all that and more, please read share and get involved.

Oakland:

California:

Other Stories:

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Oakland:

  • OUSD Students and Staff Featured in New Documentary Homeroom Heading to 2021 Sundance Film Festival This Month
    • Starting in 2019, a documentary film crew worked in OUSD watching the educational process and seeing the lives of students, along with staff and families. The intent was to show urban education through the eyes of Oakland students, specifically students at Oakland High School and on the All City Council. But then, during the 2019-20 school year, two major events changed the trajectory of the project: the start of the pandemic and the killing of George Floyd and the subsequent intensification of the Black Lives Matter movement.
  • ‘It Starts with the Idea’: Oakland Teen Creates Successful Education Business After His Young Niece and Nephew Said They Were ‘Bad’ at Science
    • Getting into science is often difficult for some kids. It’s something Ahmed Muhammad learned quickly while babysitting his niece and nephew. Muhammad is an 18-year-old senior from Oakland, California, who attends Oakland Tech High School. One day he asked his niece and nephew if they wanted to do science, and he was distraught by their reaction.
  • The Parent Exchange with Dirk Tillotson
    • The Parent Exchange with Dirk Tillotson. Discussion about the digital divide, school choice, and education.
  • Oakland Tech High School Honors Its Own Role in MLK Day — 40 Years On
    • This is “The Apollos,” a new play written, produced and performed by students from Oakland Technical High School under the guidance of their drama teacher Ena Dallas. It’s based on the real-life story of an earlier generation of Oakland Tech students, who campaigned hard almost four decades ago to get Martin Luther King Jr. Day recognized as a California holiday — several years before the national holiday was signed into law in 1983.
  • OUSD is Finally Getting Ready to Do Affordable Housing, Will They F it Up?
    • It’s been a long slog but OUSD finally is taking bids to do affordable housing at two of its vacated school sites.  For any rational actor, the idea of using otherwise vacant properties to create housing for underserved families and/or staff and potentially generate revenue, rather than pay ongoing upkeep costs for empty buildings, would be a no-brainer.  That said, OUSD has been known to play the scarecrow in this repetitive play of institutional incompetence.
  • How Mam Speakers Are Helping 1,300 Students in Oakland Navigate Remote Learning
    • Today, Oakland Unified School District’s support for Mayan Mam and other newcomer students is among the most robust in the country, from the creation of a continuation high school designed for recent immigrants to specialized counseling and educational programs. But the pandemic is threatening hard-won progress. Across Oakland’s school system, a lack of computers, internet access, technological experience and practicable home learning space have forced Mam speakers to confront even more barriers to distance learning than other students are experiencing.
  • Lighthouse steps up to screen students for dyslexia
    • There is widespread agreement about dyslexia and the implications of our failure to screen for it. The Department of Education calls it “one of the greatest contributing factors to lower achievement scores in reading.”
  • No One Prepared Me for This; Parenthood in the Age of School Choice
    • When I think back on it I realize how naive we were. Before enrollment season even started we jotted down a list of public schools for our rising Kindergartener. When school tours and info nights started it felt like all we had to do was go to confirm the final order for our district choices and check the boxes for our charter choices. Easy, right? What neither my partner nor I expected was the depth of the conversations we would dig into, the shift in priorities, and what would emerge as her learning journey into the world of public education in Oakland. Like so many other parents around us and before us we had to utter “no one prepared me for this.” Welcome to parenthood in the age of school choice.

California:

Other Stories:

  • Most Americans Didn’t Approve of Martin Luther King Jr. Before His Death, Polls Show
    • Before the monuments and the federal holiday, historians remember a time when Martin Luther King, Jr.’s popularity was plummeting. In the years leading up to his assassination, the preacher and civil rights activist was less popular than ever. A 1966 Gallup poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans had an unfavorable opinion of Dr. King and a third had a positive opinion, a 26 point unfavorable rate increase from 1963.
  • Training Bias Out of Teachers: Research Shows Little Promise So Far
    • This summer, the Des Moines, Iowa, public schools held a series of anti-racist town hall meetings in the wake of the police-led killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on people of color in their community. But the conversation rapidly turned to inequalities within in the school system.
  • Biden Expected to Make Narrowing Digital Divide an ‘Early, Urgent Priority’ to Help Students During Pandemic
    • President Joe Biden named Jessica Rosenworcel — a strong proponent of eliminating the “homework gap” — as acting chair of the Federal Communications Commission. The senior Democrat on the commission, Rosenworcel has pushed for extending an internet discount program for schools to cover broadband service in students’ homes. 
  • Biden Picks Jessica Rosenworcel as Acting FCC Chairman
    • President Joe Biden has designated Jessica Rosenworcel to be the acting chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. If she gets the job permanently, that would make her the first female to lead the 86-year-old regulatory body. She is the second woman to be named acting chair, following Mignon Clyburn.

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